Steve and Judy's Travels!

 

Love those little street tacos.  A bit of beef with shredded cabbage, tomatoes, sauteed onions, a squirt of hot sauce and a squeeze of lime, wrapped up in a tiny soft corn tortilla.  We get them in Mexico; six for five dollars.  Mouth is watering again as I describe them.

 

Makes a filling lunch.  All fresh ingredients.  Why would these little things make me sleepy?  It never fails.  It takes about an hour to walk back across the bridge, clear the border, and drive home; just in time for my involuntary nap.  No coke.  No beer.  Just tacos.  There is nothing unusual in them.  Why would this combination of ingredients put me to sleep?

 

 

 

We’re surrounded by it.  Politicians generate outrage to get attention and motivate people to vote.  It’s a political strategy.  If cable news can get people outraged enough, then their channel will get a larger audience share.  It’s a business strategy.

 

Me, I’m outraged by the intentional stoking of outrage; the concomitant disrespect of the truth.

 

 

While making sure I was using a word properly, I came across an article by Columbia Journalism Review on homophones; words that sound alike but are spelled differently or mean different things. 

 

https://www.cjr.org/language_corner/callus-callous.php

 

They were writing a mea culpa:

 

A FEW WEEKS AGO, when we wrote about the confusion over the homophones “poor,” “pour,” and “pore,” we said that another anatomical use of “pore” was “a type of callous that forms at the site of a healing fracture.”

 

More than one hardened reader called us out. We were careless to use “callous” and not “callus.” We made a homophone error in an article about homophone errors. How embarrassing, and ironic.

It’s an easy mistake to make, though we should have caught it before readers did. After all, the adjective “callous” means “being hardened and thickened,” as Merriam-Webster says. But “callus” is a noun, meaning “a thickening of or a hard thickened area on skin or bark.”

 

How great is that?  They made a homophone error in an article about homophone errors!

 

 

 

I got a call this afternoon that there was an unusual hummingbird half an hour from our house.  (Thank you Jon.)  A drive there and:

 

Mexican Violetear.

 

That’s not a normal bird for us.  It lives in Mexico and Central America.

 

Texas bird number 403 for the year.  A nice surprise!

 

 

 

Sometimes, we just eat pretty.